• Ethnic eateries operate as socio-spatial intercultural infrastructure. • Spatial models reveal neighbourhood-scale conditions of co-presence. • Korean eateries reflect suburban residential and central workplace logics. • Spatial patterns reflect classed and generational socio-spatial differentiation. • Town centres function as ordinary infrastructure structuring co-presence. Intercultural encounters and interactions have been widely examined through qualitative approaches. However, far less is known about how wider urban socio-spatial structures shape where and for whom everyday settings for sharing urban space among culturally diverse users are configured. This study addresses this gap by conceptualising ethnic eateries as intercultural infrastructure: measurable socio-spatial and operational conditions that structure opportunities for intercultural co-presence. It develops a dual-layered analytical framework linking external socio-demographic and built environments with internal culinary and operational practices. Using spatial regression techniques, including Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR), at the neighbourhood (MSOA) scale, the study examines how the distribution of Korean restaurants across London relates to these external and internal environments. The analysis identifies two spatial models: a suburban residential model, associated with Far East Asian populations and middle-income residents and characterised by a higher concentration of traditional cuisine and independent businesses; and a central workplace model, associated with high workplace density and younger, mobile professionals. Together, these models demonstrate that Korean restaurants form a spatially uneven configuration across the city’s neighbourhoods. This pattern reflects a classed and generationally selective form of everyday cosmopolitanism, understood as routine, pragmatic and consumption-based engagements with cultural difference embedded in ordinary urban life. In particular, designated town centres with low amenity diversity function as ordinary urban infrastructure that structures intercultural co-presence. These findings provide a neighbourhood-scale quantitative extension to predominantly ethnographic research on ethnic eateries and intercultural encounter.
Sang Hee Kim (Wed,) studied this question.